"Blood and Thunder": History via Kit Carson

"Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West"
by Hampton Sides
Doubleday, 460 pp., $26.95

In the opening chapters of "Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West," author Hampton Sides immerses the reader in the then-Mexican province of New Mexico in 1846. The clash between the Navajo nation and the United States is still off in the future, out toward the end of the book. But you can feel it coming, eventually, inevitably.

"The trappers," Sides writes of earlier white adventurers in the Southwest, "brought smallpox and typhoid, they brought guns and whiskey and venereal disease, they brought the puzzlement of money and the gleam of steel. And on their liquored breath they whispered the coming of an unimaginable force, of a gathering shadow on the Eastern horizon, gorging itself on the continent as it pressed steadily this way."

"Blood and Thunder" tells the story of that impending collision of cultures by tracing the lives of several prominent men.

There is John C. Fremont, who led early 19th-century expeditions to explore the American West and was instrumental in wresting California from Mexico.

Stephen Kearny comes next, another U.S. military man who marched into Santa Fe in 1846 and took a huge piece of real estate from Mexico without firing a shot.

On the Navajo side are Narbona and his son-in-law, Manuelito, whom the Americans would come to regard as spokesmen for the people who called themselves the "Dine."

But Sides tells the story mostly by recounting the life of one man: Christopher Houston Carson.

Kit Carson, as he was better known, scouted and served as courier for both Kearny and Fremont, whose praise of Carson first brought the mountain man to the attention of the American public and sent him on his way to fame in the "blood and thunder" adventure books of the era.

Born in 1809 in Kentucky, Carson headed west at age 16 and became a trapper. He fought and killed Indians many times over, and married them as well — twice. His first wife, an Arapaho, died after childbirth, and his second marriage, to a Cheyenne woman, ended in a frontier divorce after only a few months.

Then he married Josefa Jaramillo from a prominent Taos family. They stayed married for 25 years, had seven children and died within a month of each other in 1868.

Sides repaints the Carson image that has come down to us of a 19th-century action figure blasting away Indians and saving pioneer women. In "Blood and Thunder," he is still a killer of stunning efficiency and such an obedient follower of orders that he shoots down unarmed prisoners and conducts a scorched-earth policy that strips the 12,000 Navajos of the means to feed themselves.

But he is also a man who spoke Spanish and five Indian languages besides his native English, despite being illiterate. His honest character and skill as a tracker were renowned. Although he became a hero of fiction, he never made a dime off the stories written about him.

Through Carson, Sides ushers the reader smoothly through history, giving fresh perspectives on President James Polk and his policy of Manifest Destiny, the Civil War in the West and particularly the Mexican War. The United States, in its first war of foreign intervention, increased its territory by two thirds and suffered 13,768 deaths, the highest death rate per fighting soldier of any U.S. war.

Sides never neglects the Navajo, whose name derives from a Spanish translation — first made in 1626 — of a Pueblo word meaning "people of the great planted fields." He tells of their way of life, of their struggles with droughts and of the Spanish, Mexican and U.S. attempts to subdue them.

Those living in the new U.S. territory of New Mexico seemed reconciled to a deadly coexistence with the Navajo: livestock, women and children would be stolen away in raids by the Indians, and there would be incursions into Dine land to get slaves for families living in Santa Fe and Taos.

But in the 1860s, Carson became the instrument of the final solution for the Navajo: a campaign to take them from their planted fields and force them 400 miles away to a reservation that ultimately could not support them. At least 500 died on what became known to the Navajos as the Long Walk, and an estimated 3,000 died at the failed reservation.

Within five years, the Navajo were granted a reservation within their original lands — the same year as Carson's death.

Sides brings life to this history through his excellent use of stories passed down by the Navajos and of original documents, including soldiers' journals, personal letters and battle reports.

He also draws occasionally on the 1859 autobiography dictated by Carson to "a tin-eared writer who has been charitably described as an 'ass.' "

Fortunately for modern readers, Sides is neither.

John B. Saul is a former editor at The Seattle Times and now teaches journalism at the University of Montana. He can be reached at jbsaul@mac.com.